The end of Fear The Walking Dead is upon us, but just how successful has the show’s eight season run been? Let’s rank the seasons and find out.
Fear The Walking Dead is about to go the way of The Walking Dead. What we mean by that is that, after an extensive run, the show is coming to an end with the conclusion of its eighth and final season.
Its parent show ended in 2022 just as a new chapter in the TWD Universe began with the launch of three new spinoffs. It looked like Fear would be a part of that new chapter until it was confirmed that season 8 would be its last.
Like its predecessor, Fear endured a lot of highs and lows throughout its run. Originally starting out as a prequel series designed to show us all how the apocalypse began, a time-jump saw it inexplicably catch up with TWD just to become a companion show instead. And what started as a story about the Clark family’s survival evolved into a problematic character study of The Walking Dead‘s Morgan.
It’s true that a lot happened on Fear The Walking Dead throughout its run, but which seasons shone brighter than others? And which ones would we like to forget all about?
8. Season 5
The Walking Dead stumbled a lot throughout its 11-season run, with some seasons faring better than others. But never – and I mean never – did it fall so far from grace as to land down in the realm of Fear The Walking Dead season 5.
With Morgan now at the forefront of the show, it continued its descent from the once great drama it was. The character’s moral dilemmas were largely responsible for TWD‘s issues in season 7 so of course they were going to rear their head again here. And Fear suffered for it; it really did.
But Morgan wasn’t the only issue with season 5. No, this season’s shortcomings were the sum of its parts, because none of those parts were good. The villain was underwhelming, the characters unlikeable, and the plot incapable of finding anything that remotely looked like logic. And then there was the whole hot air balloon ridiculousness, Morgan’s condescending pep-talks, and the divisive found-footage format. Not even the return of Daniel Salazar nor the arrival of The Walking Dead‘s Dwight could save this season.
While questionable decisions took place in the fourth season, the creative team could have produced a solid fifth season to prove they were right to change direction or take those risks. But season 5 was the perfect example of why that was a huge mistake. The show fell off a cliff and devolved into a parody of another show entirely. This wasn’t a bad season of Fear The Walking Dead. It wasn’t Fear The Walking Dead at all.
We’d take Madison and Nick over this any day of the week.
7. Season 7
Season 7 of Fear The Walking Dead will always hold a special place in my heart as the season that finally brought Kim Dickens back as Madison Clark. At last, a sensible decision was made by the once-great show that promised to at least bring about some form of compelling storytelling ahead of its final season. It was also long overdue and a reminder that the character should never have been written off in the first place.
The rest of the season, however, wasn’t great. The main storyline saw Morgan’s group dispersed across Texas after the nuclear fallout, and as we all know in the TWD Universe, that means more excuses for separating its main characters and dragging out their eventual reunion. The other main hook of the season was Morgan and Strand clashing over their respective philosophies, and as Walking Dead fans found out the hard way, that’s never a good thing when Morgan is involved.
After showing some promise in the early days of season 6, Fear returned to its post-season 3 method of mediocrity, dragging storylines out for the sake of it, focusing on all the wrong characters, and just failing to realize that Morgan Jones stopped being an interesting character years ago.
6. Season 8
The eighth season was already set up to be Fear The Walking Dead‘s most must-see outing in years due to the return of its actual main character in Madison Clark, but it became even more must-see whenever it was announced that it would be the final season. How was the TWD Universe’s most bumpy show going to bow out after its lengthy run?
Surprise, surprise: The answer is, well, bumpy. Fear season 8 has divided audiences, with the departure of Alicia being felt, especially as it robs the show of a full-circle reunion between her and Madison. A lot of the creative decisions don’t exactly land, and for every great development, there are some problematic ones. But hey, that’s post-season 4 Fear in a nutshell, so it might as well go out as it has lived over the past few seasons.
It is a significant improvement over season 7, however, and there is really something to be said for having Madison back in action. Kim Dickens is a delight as the lead of the show and it truly is a reminder that Fear The Walking Dead‘s leading lady should have been present for the full run. That run would have been a heck of a lot smoother if that ridiculous season 4 pivot never went down.
Nevertheless, Fear went out with a focus on the right character, and it’s a reminder that Madison Clark is the show’s greatest character. Oh, how we’ll miss seeing her on our screens.
5. Season 6
After the reviled fifth season finally left our screens, Fear The Walking Dead attempted to turn things around with season 6 and finally produce something of a higher standard after its initial chapter came to a close. They managed to pull it off, with the first half of the season offering up Fear‘s most compelling drama in years. Finally, they were onto something.
This season shows us a different side to Morgan, who had been left for dead by Virginia, as he recovers and sets out on a mission to right some wrongs and reunite his group. Unfortunately, that means that the show once again takes its cues from its parent show by separating the survivors, but this is one of the rare few instances when it works.
The second half of the season doesn’t quite live up to its potential, and the multiple time jumps dragged it down (because this show doesn’t do time jumps all that well). That being said, this was the best Fear The Walking Dead was since it lost its original characters. No, it never got anywhere near the standard of its first three seasons, but it was nice to see some potential in its storytelling again.
4. Season 4
The fourth season was when it all started to go wrong for Fear The Walking Dead. In a bid to create the potential for more crossover with the main series, a senseless time-jump was engineered so that Fear would no longer be a prequel series, but a Walking Dead companion series that would run parallel to it. In theory, it was a good idea to have that kind of show, but that meant destroying the legacy that Fear The Walking Dead had built immediately after one of the strongest seasons in the whole TWD Universe. And that was unforgivable.
The Walking Dead‘s Lennie James reprised his role as Morgan, who had now become the show’s co-lead opposite Kim Dickens’ Madison Clark, or at least that’s what we thought. Madison was subsequently “killed off” off-screen just a few short episodes later, while her son Nick was also a casualty of the change-in-direction.
In just eight episodes, all that was good about Fear had been taken from it and we were left with another dull series devoted to personality vacuum Morgan. It was disrespectful to the legacy that the show had built and, as made clear by every season that came after it, a bloody stupid decision.
3. Season 2
After Fear The Walking Dead‘s brief-but-gripping beginnings, there was intrigue to see how it would handle a longer season. Its second outing, with its 15-episode count, would answer that question. That answer? Pretty well.
Set in the aftermath of season 1, season 2 picks up with the survivors now on the sea, heading towards the hope of new beginnings. Joining them on their journey this time was Daniel Salazar and his daughter Ofelia, as well as the mysterious Victor Strand. Daniel and Strand often clashed over how to stay alive, especially because the latter wasn’t as upfront about himself as Daniel would have liked.
The idea of Walking Dead on the sea is so exciting that it’s hard to believe Fear‘s parent show hadn’t tried it before, and I’m happy to report that the excitement of it remained intact after seeing the show attempt it. It definitely played into a lot of the themes the show was exploring, as the promise of new beginnings continued to drive everyone in these early days of the apocalypse while the isolation of being out on the water with both dysfunctional families and strangers made for an incredibly intriguing dynamic (while the threat of what was out there loomed large).
It meandered here and there, but all in all, Fear season 2 expanded on what we learned in the first season and began exploring new areas of the newly-desolated world.
2. Season 1
When we all heard that The Walking Dead would be getting a spinoff, there was always going to be excitement. The fact that Fear The Walking Dead was a prequel to the main show; well that just made it so much better.
Set at the beginning of the TWD Universe’s apocalypse, the six-episode first season focused on the dysfunctional Clark family, featuring Madison Clark and her fiancee Travis, as well as Madison’s teenage children Nick and Alicia, and Travis’ son Chris. That right there was a compelling cast of characters for any TV series as the family drama was strong from the offset, particularly when it came to Nick, who was struggling with his addiction to drugs, but the show offered a new look at how the walkers came to be.
As fans of HBO’s The Last of Us will know, there is something so terrifying about watching the world fall apart in this genre, and Fear The Walking Dead dramatized that incredibly well in just six episodes, showing us how a normal family with their own grounded issues suddenly found themselves desperate for survival after the collapse of the world around them.
Fear‘s first season was a thrilling introduction to this world’s early days and that prequel element made it such an important part of this overarching TWD story. These weren’t hardened soldiers like the survivors of The Walking Dead, they were just ordinary flawed people, and that set it apart, also setting the stage for a new gripping story of survival.
1. Season 3
In its early seasons, Fear The Walking Dead was a series that showed a lot of promise, but in its third season, it really started living up to that promise.
Kicking things off with a genuinely unexpected death when Travis was shot, it completely upset the established status quo and forced the remaining characters into a spiral as they struggled to comprehend the loss and survive without him. The Clarks found refuge at the US-Mexico border in the Ottos’ ranch, but they quickly found themselves caught in a war between them and Qaletaqa Walker, who claimed the Ottos stole his land.
What followed was a compelling saga that saw Madison evolve into a hardened leader as she attempted to make the best decisions for the future of her family, regardless of what was going on around her. Meanwhile, the dynamic between Nick and Troy Otto was easily one of the best aspects of the season, as it left us all on the edges of our seats, and not really sure what was about to happen between them.
Season 3 of Fear The Walking Dead wasn’t just the best season of Fear, it was the best season of the whole Walking Dead Universe. That’s how good it is, and that’s what makes the disrespectful decision to move away from these characters and this storyline all the more baffling. Fear was never this great (or even good) ever again.
Which season of Fear The Walking Dead is your favorite? Can you believe the show is coming to an end?